Saturday, March 21, 2009

A Few Answers

Aha! Here's the reason Page updates aren't appearing in the newsfeed. This is the message appearing at the top of the Facebook home page right now:
Pages are now a part of News Feed
From now on, posts from Pages you are a fan of will show up in your News Feed. You can hide their posts by clicking the 'x' in the top right corner of the post. If you would like to see posts from Pages you connected to the in past, click here.

That last sentence is not as clear as it could be. Basically, they've defaulted all the Pages you're already a fan of to the "hidden" list -- that's why they're not showing up in the feed. If you click on the link in the message, it opens a box with a list of all the things currently "hidden":


So you need to go through and click all the "Add to News Feed" buttons, manually.

(Why? Why should people have to do all this work to be able see Page updates? I don't understand why Facebook keeps shooting itself in the foot this way. If the whole idea of turning Pages into Public Profiles was to make them more integrated and accessible (and, presumably, profitable...), then why in the world did are they making users jump through all these hoops?)

Anyway, it probably wouldn't hurt to send out a real Update to your fans reminding them to click that link and unblock you, or at least to post about it on your Page (of course, who knows if anyone will see it!).

(PS: extra points to Lara, commenting on my previous post, for discovering the "See hidden posts" link before Facebook put up this message. )

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I discovered this earlier today too--completely by accident. So weird--talk about an unnecessary 'double opt in.'

Anonymous said...

I'm confused -- where is this page and how do you get to it?

Michelle said...

If you're not seeing a message at the top of your home page (apparently not everyone is), try scrolling all the way to the bottom of your home page instead, and look for the "See Hidden Friends" link.

Anonymous said...

I don't have a message at the top of my home page and I don't have a "see hidden friends" link at the bottom. Not only that but the Pages I am a fan of are no longer visible anywhere on my home page or profile, nor in my friends' home pages. Where did they go? Arg!

Anonymous said...

Scroll to the bottom of your News Feed and click the "Edit Options" link. That should bring up the "Hidden Friends" window.

Anonymous said...

There is nothing at the bottom of my News Feed that says "edit options." Am I living in an alternate universe?

I did, by the way, find the pages I'm a fan of, now buried in my Info tab.

Michelle said...

Anon(s?) who can't see the "edit options" link -- are you using Internet Explorer? As far as I can tell, that may be the culprit.

Try clicking on a different "filter" or your news feed -- "Photos" for instance -- and see if the "edit options" bar shows up at the bottom there, or when you switch back to the regular news feed...?